Thursday, May 29, 2008

Once again, it is unspeakably late. One day I'll go through and edit all these nonsensical, jumbled, poorly-written late-night entries.

Good day today. Everyone was in a great mood and we got a lot done. The morning was hard because Aidan was exhausted and cranky but refused to nap. Isabel decided to play gymnastics while I dealt with him - she misses her gymnastics classes. We're currently in a 6-ish-week lull between Spring and Summer programs, and she's getting a bit stir-crazy. Everything starts back up at the end of June and beginning of July. For now, though, we have a pink plastic balance beam and a very dedicated little gymnast hard at work in the living room.

Aidan finally fell asleep around lunchtime, so I whipped up some food and Isabel and I got to spend some time sitting together, eating and talking. When we finished with that, we moved on to some schoolwork.

We finished our vowels! It feels like we've been covering vowels forever. We will continue to do brief vowel reviews regularly, but we are done learning our vowel poem and working intensively on short-vowel sounds. Tomorrow we move on to consonants. It's possible I'll put aside our letter/phoneme work until after next week's vacation. It may be best to periodically call out to Isabel, "Hey, what's the short-vowel sound of A?" over the next week or so, for review, then start fresh with consonants when we get back.

We've also been working on Frog Jump Capitals in Handwriting Without Tears. We reviewed letters we've covered so far, then played a game in which Isabel had to begin writing a letter by making her line and frog-jumping back up, then I'd call out what letter to write. It reinforces the correct way to form the letters and Isabel thought it was great - she was giggling so much that her pencil was shaking. We also did some copywork

A friend of mine sent a lovely package to us with some gorgeous shirts her daughter has outgrown, a package of Brain Quest cards and a neat little workbook dealing with story sequencing, something I've spoken with my friend about Isabel having some trouble with. Isabel adores workbooks of all kinds and was chomping at the bit to begin a new one. She likes workbooks the way most kids like coloring books. This workbook is wonderful because it involves cutting out the various sentences from the story and then gluing them on the page in order. Anything that requires cutting and gluing makes Isabel very happy. We completed one story and I promised Isabel we'll do the next tomorrow.

The Brain Quest cards were something new for me - I've seen them in stores but never looked at them carefully. So after I read Isabel a story, we sat with the cards to see what they're all about.

They. Are. Awesome.

Isabel LOVES them. I'm going to have to go buy her more, as many as I can find. This packet had 300 questions in it - we promptly went through 150 of those questions and only stopped because I said we should save the rest for later. Isabel would have happily plowed through the other 150 right then if I'd let her. The cards have all kinds of questions - pictures with items missing that need to be identified, sequencing (yay!), number recognition, counting, shape recognition, letter recognition, rhyming, and so many others. We had a lot of fun with them.

We rounded out the day by watching Annie and then, when Nick got home, he and Isabel played a game they made up that involves trying to knock one another's blocks down by rolling a ball. I'm not sure I fully understand it, but they love it.